Soledad Atienza, Director of the Bachelor of Laws program and Vice Dean of International Relations, tells us more about the project and the program itself.
The Gawa project was the project that we launched this year for the first time for the PLE students.
It is a project that we offer to all students to participate in and the Gawa projects consist of developing and doing an economic, political, and legal analysis for a social impact fund. In particular, this year, they chose to do it for a specific cooperative in Colombia.
We chose to do this on social impact investment because it brings together some of the values of IE University and also some of the specific values of the PLE program. It is innovative, it is social, it is connected to the humanities, and it is very much connected to the three academic areas of the PLE program.
The PLE program provides some very relevant skills that will make students succeed in analytical projects, also research projects in particular, and in projects that have a social impact.
The most relevant skill in the PLE program is to be able to connect three different disciplines: politics, law, and economics; as well as many other communication skills and interpersonal skills.
One of the students, Ricardo Ángel, tells us about the project:
“So apart from the market analysis, which helps us understand the situation for cooperatives in Colombia, we were able to contact the main agricultural cooperative in Colombia, in terms of income. This is the cooperative called Colanta, and the most important part of this is that it helps Gawa have a real investment opportunity.
This investment will consist of a three-year investment of €2 million, with an interest rate of EFD plus two percent, EFD being an economic measurement of the Colombian economy. In this way, we are providing Gawa with a real investment opportunity that they can use if they decide to do so, in order for their investors to gain an edge and a profit out of the investment, and for them to make a real social impact through the most important agricultural cooperative in Colombia.”
Lea Mathies, a student who participated in Gawa, share her experience with us:
“It was quite helpful to see how the PLE degree can be applied in the real world. The project fits in with the PLE degree, first of all—especially for us working on the project, but also for our other classmates who saw the presentation—to see some ways we might use our degree later on, or what kind of careers we can work in; but also it was a great connection of the three areas of our degree (political, legal, and economic) because doing our research, we had to combine the three to understand the way the cooperatives work in Colombia and the impact of social investment.”